The present invention relates to collection and conversion of solar energy to other energy forms such as electric and thermal energies.
The rapidly dwindling petroleum-based sources of energy have increased focus on more renewable and sustainable alternative sources of energy. Among those alternatives, solar power stands out for its practically infinite supply, practically no Green House pollution, and easy access. A variety of prior art products and systems have been developed to collect and utilize solar energy. However, such products and systems suffer from many disadvantages such as complex and large size structures, great initial cost, central point of failure, and high susceptibility to operational damage.
One example is BrightSource Energy's Luz Power Tower (LPT) 550 energy system. This system requires a large area for housing thousands of mirrors, each of which track the sun and reflect sunlight to a central boiler located on a high tower. Superheated stream from the boiler is delivered to a standard turbine where electricity is generated. Due to its large scale requirement and forbiddingly high cost, this technology lacks flexibility to apply to individual homes or businesses. As a result of receiving radiation reflected from the thousands of mirrors, the boiler is often overheated and thus wears out fast exposing the entire deployment to a major problem of central point of failure. The overall efficiency of the solar farm is hence reduced considerably. Moreover, frequent and costly maintenance efforts are required for the thousands of mirrors as they are directly exposed to the outside environment.
Another conventional approach is represented by Solel's UVAC 2008 solar receiver. This system operates via a gigantic parabolic trough that collects heat from the sun. A solar field for such system is typically located in a desert or other remote areas. Accordingly transmission of power generated by this system is burdensome and costly. Additionally, Solel's system suffers from the same deficiencies as the LPT system.
Similar to Solel's UVAC system, the ZenithSolar Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) system employs a very large disk to gather the solar rays. Myriads of flat mirrors are disposed over the surface of the disk to reflect radiation towards a solar cell. Because the individual mirror needs to be discretely handled, installation and alignment of these mirrors makes this system highly labor intensive. In addition, the interconnection of the numerous system parts requires a high precision level that can only be achieved by compromising efficiency of assembling and maintaining it.